OAK Racing’s disappointment at losing the Watkins Glen Six Hours on a late restart was washed away in the champagne that followed a dominant performance at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. The Mobil 1 SportsCar Grand Prix presented by Hawk Performance was the ninth round of United SportsCar's 14-race TUDOR Championship, and Gustavo Yacaman and Olivier Pla drove a fairly untroubled race to score a 7.9sec win over the Spirit of Daytona Racing Corvette DP, the car that beat them at the Glen.

And if that sounds like a close margin of victory, Pla was merely paying out the line and being extra cautious in traffic in that final stint, while Richard Westbrook was being his typically aggressive, nothing-to-lose self after earlier setbacks.

Note too, that the race went without yellow-flag periods, despite some sizable collisions.

In the GT Le Mans category, the Corvette Racing No. 3 of Antonio Garcia and Jan Magnussen scored its fourth consecutive win in the TUDOR Championship, beating the Dodge SRT Viper GTS-Rs of Jonathan Bomarito/Kuno Wittmer and Marc Goossens/Dominik Farnbacher, a result that echoed the American Le Mans Series race here last year.

GT Daytona provided the late-race thrills…and, in fact, thrills throughout. Ultimately, the Jeroen Bleekemolen/Ben Keating Viper Exchange Dodge Viper GT3-R grabbed the lead on the last lap from the Park Place Racing Porsche 911 GT America of Kevin Estre/Patrick Lindsey.

A bold start saw Scott Sharp slot the No. 1 Extreme Speed Motorsports HPD ARX-03b into first, but Yacaman soon reasserted himself, and the Corvette DPs of Action Express Racing and Spirit of Daytona also moved into the top three. While the track was clear, the Morgan-Nissan was able to set lap times some half a second quicker than its pursuers, but once they started hitting traffic, the DPs were at least able to slow the rate at which they were losing out.

Fittipaldi made contact with a GT car which damaged some bodywork and caused a puncture, which dropped the AXR car out of the lead battle in the first half-hour of the race. However, his threat was replaced by another one at the halfway mark as Ryan Dalziel pushed the ESM HPD No. 1 until it was only 5sec behind Michael Valiante (SDR) and 15sec from OAK Racing’s leader.

Then, as Valiante handed over to Westbrook, seatbelt problems caused the stop to drag out, allowing Dalziel to emerge from his pit stop some 15sec ahead of the No. 90. Still the Scot didn’t have a clear shot at closing down the lead car – now driven by Olivier Pla – as Jordan Taylor had the Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP up into second place, and the car’s straightline speed was keeping him out of reach. With 55 minutes to go, it became a moot point, as Dalziel brought the HPD into the pits with a broken exhaust header.

That left Pla with an 11sec margin over Taylor, with Westbrook a further 15sec down, contending with a gear selection issue which teammate Valiante had been wrestling with almost from the start. Nonetheless, Westbrook closed down the WTR Corvette until, with half an hour to go, he was filling his mirrors; after a few laps he spotted his chance and grabbed second from the championship leaders. Westbrook then made a determined go of closing down OAK’s Morgan-Nissan, but it was too much to ask and the gap only concertinaed whenever they hit traffic.